Echoes of the Lost Literature of the Wuffings at Sutton Hoo
This is a page about the close relation between the Anglo-Saxon rite of mound-burial and the genre of Old English royal genealogical poetry. I discuss this matter in more detail in Chapters Two and Three of my book, The Origins of Beowulf [D.S.Brewer 1993].
Examples of similar genealogical poetry are preserved in Old Norse sagas and help to amplify the echoes of the genre found in the Old English verse, such as in the epic of Beowulf and in the heroic catalogue poem Widsith.
Although an Old English genealogical poem concerned directly with the Wuffings has not survived, the existence of such a poem is indicated by a reference in the Passio of the late eighth-century East Anglian king and martyr, St Æthelbert.
On the basis of this reference, and drawing on the echoes of genealogical verse in Old English heroic poetry, I have attempted to replicate such a poem about the Wuffings, which I have called the Wuffingagetæl, the ‘Tally of the Wuffings’. I suggest that its opening might have sounded something like this in Old English:
hwæt we ærwilum Wuffinga
þeodena þrym gefrunon,
hu þa wulfcyningas weoldon
æþeleard EstEnglelond?
hwa mæg segeð soðe mære,
on hwilcum beorgum eacenbanas gebidian?
What have we heard of the heroism
of the Wuffing folk-lords of long ago,
of how those wolf-kings commanded
East Anglia’s ancestral soil?
Who can tell of their true fame,
or in which barrows their mighty bones sleep?